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On February  25th they are launching an exciting new legal news service  Legal  Radar which I believe  his targeted to deflate the aggressive growth and pricing of its main competitor Law360. American Lawyer Media’s flagship publication, American Lawyer has been credited with inventing the legal news market in the 1980s.  ALM  has been exploring ways to reinvent  how lawyers consume legal news for several  years.  The relaunch of Law.com brought content from all 19 ALM legal publications together in a unified platform. The old legal intelligence platform was relaunched as Legal Compass. On Tuesday they will launch an AI…
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Mona Kalantar Mona Kalantar, a 3L at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, has been a research assistant for Daniel W. Linna Jr. at since May 2019. In this guest post, Mona highlights ways for attorneys to become data-driven. Doing so will add to the general body of knowledge and create industry-standards that could lead to the improvement of legal services. Guest post by Mona Kalantar In his 2012 article, Where is the ‘Quality Movement’ in Law Practice?, Professor William H. Simon argued that the quest for continuous improvement has largely bypassed legal practice. The legal profession has not…
Judge Richard Mills, U.S. District Judge for the Central District of Illinois, never considered a career as anything other than a lawyer. Growing up in central Illinois, he idolized Abraham Lincoln, who practiced law before being elected to the U.S. presidency. He watched his grandfather, father, and uncle serve as local attorneys, providing legal help to members of the small Illinois communities he loves. So, after graduating from Mercer University School of Law in Georgia in 1957, he turned down an opportunity to clerk for a federal judge in Alaska to return to Virginia, Illinois, and practice law with his…
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Here is a recent Daily Record column. My past Daily Record articles can be accessed here. ***** ABA Technology Survey Results: Cybersecurity Measures Taken by Firms If cybersecurity isn’t on your radar in 2020, then it’s high time you made it a priority. The risk of a breach that could compromise your law firm’s confidential client data is an increasing likelihood, especially if your firm hasn’t enacted security measures designed to counter cybersecurity threats. This is especially so in the wake of news, as reported by the ABA Journal in mid-February, that a Texas law firm’s data was hacked and…
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Rippe & Kingston Systems, a Cincinnati-based company that has provided legal and financial management software to law firms since 1982, has changed its name to SurePoint Technologies. The change is part of a rebranding initiative to better align the company’s name with its commitment to delivering cutting-edge enterprise solutions that help law firms unlock increasingly higher levels of efficiency and financial performance, the company said in an announcement. “Our new identity as SurePoint Technologies reflects our vision for the future and the tremendous confidence our customers have shown in us over the years – that they trust us, rely…
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The merger this week of two major technology companies has resulted in what is now the single-largest provider of business intelligence technology to law firms, the companies’ principals say. Iridium Technology and Data Fusion Technologies (DFTech), both of which provide business intelligence (BI) technology to many of the largest law firms in the United States, announced their merger Tuesday. The merged company will continue under the Iridium name. It also includes the line of financial management products developed by consultant Randy Steere and acquired by DFTech in 2018. Whether measured by clients, revenue, employees or product footprint, the new company…
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The Illinois Supreme Court has launched a pro bono pilot program to reduce the backlog of criminal appeals in the state. During the six-month pilot, which was announced on Feb. 11, volunteer pro bono attorneys will substitute as counsel for lawyers in the Office of the State Appellate Defender (OSAD) in certain criminal appeals. The pilot will include direct appeals in jury and non-jury cases with records of 1,300 pages or less. Oral arguments will be encouraged so pro bono attorneys can gain experience arguing before the appellate court. The pilot will launch in the First and Second Districts of…
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Level 2 Legal Solutions, which calls itself a legal services company, today announced the formation of new Compliance and Privacy Practice Areas. These practice areas, according to Level 2 Legal, are specifically geared towards corporate counsel and law firm needs. That in and of itself might not necesarily sound like big news, especially since Level 2 Legal has been in this space for a while. But what Level 2 Legal is doing is, in fact, a good lesson in disruption, innovation, and how to compete in today’s changing legal marketplace. Level 2 Legal started about 11 years ago as…
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On Monday, the ABA House of Delegates overwhelmingly voted to adopt Resolution 115 encouraging the exploration of regulatory innovation to expand civil legal services. But many say the last-minute addition of a clause stating the resolution wouldn’t alter the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct diminishes its impact. Background on Resolution 115 Resolution 115 was proposed in response to the growing access to justice crisis in which more than 80% of low and moderate-income Americans are unable to obtain effective civil legal assistance. The original resolution and supporting report, which was signed by Dan Rodriguez, a professor at Northwestern Pritzker…
State trial court data and analytics company Trellis lands Alon Shwartz, as Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer and closes an additional $4.4M dollar funding round, led by Craft Ventures.  Included in the flurry of progress and announcements for the state court data and analytics startup, Trellis also announced that David Sacks, Founding COO of Paypal, Founder/CEO of Yammer, and Co-Founder of Craft Ventures has joined the Trellis Board of Directors.  Trellis new co-founder and CPO, Shwartz, is a career entrepreneur and prominent LA tech exec who previously co-founded Docstoc – an original TechCrunch40 company – that helped…
State trial court data and analytics company Trellis lands Alon Shwartz, as Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer and closes an additional $4.4M dollar funding round, led by Craft Ventures.  Included in the flurry of progress and announcements for the state court data and analytics startup, Trellis also announced that David Sacks, Founding COO of Paypal, Founder/CEO of Yammer, and Co-Founder of Craft Ventures has joined the Trellis Board of Directors.  Trellis new co-founder and CPO, Shwartz, is a career entrepreneur and prominent LA tech exec who previously co-founded Docstoc – an original TechCrunch40 company – that helped…
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Lawyers who have the AbacusLaw practice management software can now use their client, calendar and matter information to automatically create documents in the latest version of the HotDocs Advance document-generation software. AbacusNext, the company that owns both AbacusLaw and HotDocs, said it has launched an integration between the two products that provides users with the ability to automatically assemble error-free documents using the client, calendar and case information already in the AbacusLaw system. Scott Johnson, AbacusNext CEO, said the integration “is a pivotal moment for the company, as it marks the first integration between two of our flagship products.”…
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The legal industry relies upon the writings and communications of lawyers, judges, and lawmakers. For the citizens and clients who are subject to these legal writings, understanding the legalese is painfully frustrating. We were asked by a fan of the show (in full disclosure, it was Greg’s sister-in-law Wendy) why lawyers can’t write in plain English. We pulled together a panel of four experts on legal communications and asked them just that. It turns out that writing in plain English is not only possible, but it is the preferred method of legal writing. Our guests on this episode are: Listen…
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Black History Month is a time to celebrate the achievements of African Americans and to recognize the critical role of black people in U.S. history. In 1926, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) sponsored the first national Negro History Week. The group chose the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglass. Negro History Week gained prominence in the following decades, receiving annual proclamations from mayors of cities across the U.S. In 1976, President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month. He urged the public to “seize…